


duyên nợ | debt and fate

by bittermelons



Category: Song Lang (2018)
Genre: Character Death, Spoilers, Yearning, sorry im stupid and i love this gay ass viet movie that no one on here has seen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-27
Updated: 2019-10-27
Packaged: 2021-01-04 07:53:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21194216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bittermelons/pseuds/bittermelons
Summary: 10 years after Dung and Linh Phung first met, Vietnam has re-opened its borders to the world, and its diasporic communities are returning home to visit, including Dung’s mother.





	duyên nợ | debt and fate

Every full moon of the 7th month, Linh Phung brings offerings to Dung’s picture at the temple. He kneels to place his offerings - some persimmons, a can of beer, a pack of cigarettes - on the altar, then stands. People say that time erases all things, but each time Linh Phung sees the necklace he draped onto Dung’s frame, he’s transported back to their meeting, as vividly as if it were the night before. 

I wanted to touch you, he remembers. The first time, on the rooftop. I was looking at the clouds because otherwise I would be looking at you. How the moonlight danced on your cheekbones. How it fell upon the soft indent above your lips. I wanted to trace the shapes of the shadows with my fingertips, and if I had known that you wouldn’t push me away, I would have. The second time, watching you play đàn nguyệt, I knew you would have let me. Men who lash out at me are only scared of themselves. In that song, I knew we had stumbled upon some kind of bravery together. 

But I can’t do any of that now, can I, because you were stupid enough to be cruel, and it caught up with you in the end. Mầy thì phải biết ơn tao, Linh Phung thinks. Ten years of ensuring your wayward spirit had a place to rest. 

A few days after Dung’s death, Lan had walked backstage of the theatre and tossed Linh Phung’s housekey onto his dresser. He turned around from the mirror to meet her eyes.  
"Ủa? Tìm chiều khoá tôi ở đâu vậy?"  
“Trong nhà của Dũng.” she had said. “Bị giết thì phải dọn nhà giùm.”  
I knew it, Linh Phung had thought hazily. As soon as I heard the sing of the blade on stage, I knew it.  
Lan had said nothing, scrutinizing Linh Phung in a way that made his skin prickle more than a sold-out crowd ever had. Then she turned around and left as abruptly as she had came in. Linh Phung put down his makeup brush, a slight tremor in his hand. 

“Anh ơi, sắp bắt đầu nè!”  
He took a deep breath, then stood, clad in princely blue and silver robes, and walked to the curtains, waiting for his cue to emerge. 

When he walked by Dung’s apartment later that night, its contents had been unceremoniously dumped outside to be sold and make room for the next tenant. Linh Phung salvaged what he could carry on his moped: Nghe Si Hong Dieu’s dresser, a few worn books, a lamp that glowed soft orange like the morning sky. 

After he first bought Dung’s place at the temple, to his surprise, he wasn’t the only visitor. Lan, the two kids she worked with, a couple neighbors who realized that Dung had paid off their debts, all eventually found and paid their respects to Thien Loi. Though that was only right, Linh Phung thinks. They actually knew him. All he had claim to was a night. 

But a night that was a world, bright and impossible. A world that he thought of when he went to that underground bar in District 1 for the first time years ago and caught the glances of men who recognized their own loneliness in his. A world he had returned to in his performances for years, his eyes alight upon his bride, his shoulders wracked with sobs over her dead body, every female lover taking place of a real one. At least you gave me someone to sing to, he thinks. Maybe we’re even. 

* 

By 2005, Thien Ly Theatre remained open, but attendance had dwindled so much that now the troupe only performed on weekends. Weekdays were for tuong xa hoi, the government-sponsored troupe whose songs were thinly disguised propaganda. No wonder people stopped coming to the theatre, staff whispered to each other. These people were walking socialist brochures, not artists. 

Co Mai, his ever-generous benefactor, had found Linh Phung a day job teaching music lessons at a private school in District 1. He usually passed the theatre on his drive home in District 5, but this evening, he stops. There’s a woman outside, looking up at the fading THIEN LY sign. She’s about his mother’s age, silk black hair tied into a knot at the nape of her neck.  
Cô ơi, cô có cần gì ở đây không? he calls.  
Con là nghệ sĩ hả? She asks. There’s something about her that he can’t quite place -her accent is standard Saigonese, but it’s the way she carries herself, the crisp fabric of her clothes. Once she says she just came from phi truong Tan Son Nhat, he knows immediately.  
"Cô là người Mỹ," he says.  
"Ai cũng nhận ra lien!" she laughs. Đúng rồi, con. Cô là Cô Hổng Điểu. "Ngày xưa cô là nghẹ sĩ cải lương ở đây trước khi cô đi qua Mỹ."

Hearing her say her name, Hồng Điểu, feels like a shock of cold water. Linh Phung walked by her portrait each night on his way backstage. Her dresser lives in a corner of his run-down apartment, and her son, he realizes, is no longer here. She must be looking for him. 

Linh Phung chooses his words carefully. "Dạ, con biết cô là ai rồi. Rồi con cũng quen với Dũng. Con của cổ, phải không?"

"Dũng? Dũng còn ở đây hả?" Cô Hồng Điểu’s voice fades when she sees Linh Phung’s eyes fixed on the ground rather than meeting hers. à, she says softly. An orange light flickers above the quiet space between them. 

"I tried to bring him with me, you know," she finally says. "After his father passed away, I sent sponsorship letters that would have guaranteed his safe passage. But years passed with no reply. I had to assume that if he was alive, he wanted nothing to do with me." 

"You were his friend?" she asks Linh Phung. He nods, seizing at the easier explanation. "How did you meet? What was he like, grown up? Did he tell you about me?" 

Linh Phung is grateful when his stomach, betraying animal that it is, stops his words with a dissenting growl. 

"Oh, you must be starving!" Co Hong Dieu exclaims, and her instinct to feed, one that all Vietnamese women share, suddenly activates. "Let me take you to dinner." 

* 

It must have been years since Co Hong Dieu called herself a performer, but she still walks with the grace of a dancer, the hollows of her cheeks catching the moonlight. Linh Phung walks her to a hu tieu alley stall by his apartment. As they wait for their bowls to come to the table, Linh Phung watches Co Hong Dieu slice open a pepper and delicately remove its seeds with her spoon. He likes her, he decides.  
She catches him watching and smiles. "Co la nguoi mien Tay," she says. "Khong an cay duoc. I have to put sugar in everything."  
"Da, con cung nhu vay," he agrees. 

After he cleans his bowl to her satisfaction, she sets her utensils down. "Now, tell me about my son," she says. 

Linh Phung watches her face as he unspools the story: that Dung was a debt collector, that his nickname was Thien Loi, that they had met at the cai luong theatre when Dung came to collect from the tailor. That cai luong had made them unlikely friends, but soon after, a debtor had retaliated violently against Dung, and that was the end of it. 

"I knew," Co Hong Dieu says, her eyes glimmering. "You won’t believe me, but I knew. I felt it. Linh Phung nods, understanding more than he was willing to say." 

She takes a breath, steady and slow. Then looks at him more carefully. "You said you saved his things?" she asks. 

When she sees the dresser upstairs, she puts her left hand to her mouth. The other hand traces the engraved letters in aged wood: N.S. HONG DIEU. She carefully opens it, pulls at a few small drawers to find old costume earrings, a silk sash, a tassel. 

Linh Phung lets her stand there for a moment, as if in a trance, because he knows where she’s going. She’s time traveling back to the golden age of cai luong, to the countless nights Thien Ly with her wandering, curious son. After a few minutes, he steps closer. Do you want some tea? he asks. 

Over their steaming cups, he shows her the books he salvaged, Dung’s father’s song lyrics tucked into one of them. It had faded so much that Linh Phung had traced over what he remembered of the words in pencil. Co Hong Dieu remains quiet, as she has been since she entered his home. 

“Thank you, con,” she finally says.  
“Take it. All of it, it’s yours.”

She nods gratefully, clasping the folded song lyrics in her hands. “I didn’t come here to find them, you know. My husband is here to visit his brothers in Kien Giang. I was going to stay at the hotel and rest, but I wanted to see if the theatre was still there.” 

“I tried to forget. You have to understand, life over there is harder than you’d think. If you hold on, you’ll never survive, I told myself. But I couldn’t. Nothing would let me. When my generation left, they brought as much of Vietnam with them as they could. The restaurants, the stores, the music, even the old flag. I would walk around on streets as flat and spread out as here, sit in bars playing the same cai luong I grew up with. If you close your eyes, it’s almost the same as the old Saigon. But it’s also not, either.”

“Here isn’t the same as it was, either,” Linh Phung replies, gesturing to the construction piercing the sky outside his window. 

“No, it isn’t. Nothing ever is.” 

Easier to forget, he thinks. Easier to let life follow the river into tomorrow. And yet my body always pulls me upstream, whether I want to travel there or not. 

“Maybe you don’t have to hold on,” he says slowly. “And maybe you don’t have to forget, either. Maybe we can just remember when we need to, and maybe be a little wiser for it.”

She’s quiet for a bit, then laughs. “I knew you were a performer like me,” she says. “Head always in the clouds. I don’t know if I can take all of this with me, but I trust you’ll take good care of what I have to leave behind. She takes out a piece of paper and scrawls on it, then hands it to Linh Phung.  
“Here. My phone and address. Give me yours and I’ll send what I can to take care of my son’s resting place. No-don’t say no. I’m older than you, so you have to do what I say.”

Linh Phung reads the paper: 8288 Magnolia Boulevard, Santa Ana, California, USA. An almost-Saigon city. “I’d like to visit someday,” he says. 

Co Hong Dieu strokes his hair affectionately. “You’re always welcome.” 

She stands up to leave, taking a few of Dung’s books and trinkets in her purse on her way, then faces Linh Phung again. 

“You really would like it if you visited. People there still love cai luong the way it was meant to be.”

He nods and she kisses him on the cheek before she leaves, walking out into the orange glow of the night.

**Author's Note:**

> if you watched this movie please talk to me  
im also posting now but i'll add english translations to some dialogue in a bit


End file.
